The guaranteed rare really needs to be removed from NV and replaced with something else in order for this to work.

On guaranteed drops:

They are not good at all. In fact, they do more harm than good. While these may have been a band-aid solution previously the advent of Paragon Levels means that everyone has MF% to some degree. Add onto this NV stacks and there should be no need for any guaranteed drops.

These games were founded on the lottery system of drops, and should remain that way. What's the point in me playing if I already know what will happen? It removes the sense of accomplishment when you finally hit pay dirt.

I love that the rare drop rate is being reduced. I'd love to see fewer rares that are higher quality. I'd also prefer it if all forms of guaranteed drops (aside from keys and key plans) be removed. People should be farming where they have fun and get the most bang for their buck... not where the devs tell them to sniff out specific drops.

I read the journal and it's a big step in the right direction and I hope to see at least some of those fixes make it to 1.08. One big problem is too many people are so obsessed with dps, dps, dps and they ignore vitality and resists on alot of their gear. It lets players like me buy them up on the cheap. Perhaps disallow rings, amulets gloves from rolling cc+cd together so there will be no future trifectas. However players will be compenstated with new, powerful stats that are more defense based rather than pure dps. Reduce monster power HP by 25% and increase monster dps by 25% and some people will start selling their trifectas for bifectas with more ehp.

Another perk with monster density could be to increase monster density per party member... maybe +20% monster density per extra player? This would give you 60% additional trash mobs to wade through with a full party of 4.

Lylirra, will Blizzard continue to address goldprice drops with failed goldsinks like in 1.07? Don't you guys realize that the economy is this bad because of the rollbacks and the boting?

Here is a picture of the biggest chinese boter team: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=zui2ok&s=6They haven't been banned for 45 days now!! Goldprice drops ever since than. They sell 100 billion gold/day at bijiaqi.com for 0.45 RMB/mil. Their bots run 24/7, all you would need to do is check playtime to filter the bots. Goldprice used to be 0.2$ at the end of 1.06, now its at 0.07$.

And the rollbacks... All you need to do is make an acc with a friend's ID from a proxy, level the char to 60, and claim that the gear was stolen, so blizzard will dupe it for you for free. Instant billions of gold, everytime you do it. No wonder the gold is worthless.

And now in 1.08 you claim that you work on new goldsinks? Hah! Worked well in 07...

The truth is, blizzard's goal is to sell as many copies of d3 as possible. They don't care if you enjoy the game, don't care if you stop playing after a week, and don't care about the game's economy either. The only bot bans happened with demonbuddy because the bot was public and well-known, and had negative impact on the marketing of d3.

So stop pretending that any of you guys actually care about anything else than the money.

We’d like to continue with this line of reasoning and use it to make Legendaries more powerful. In the future, we plan to allow Legendary items to also roll their base stats (weapon DPS and armor value) at the level of the monster that dropped them. So, for example, if you found a Heart of Iron from a level 63 monster, its base armor would be increased to that of Archon Armor and its stat ranges would roll at level 63. This gives us the opportunity to broaden the range of Legendary items, providing players with more diversity. Love Leoric's Signet, but hate wearing a level 17 ring? Me too. Instead of farming Act II Normal to find a Leoric's Signet, let's go farm Inferno and get a level 63 version of the ring!

A. Just because an item's level is higher, does not give it even a remotely better chance to be "awesome". This will change....NOTHING.B. Example of Leoric's Signet rolling level 60 stats. This sounds all well and good, and would be worth using, but it sounds like you're going to have every single brown and set item in the game available to drop on inferno. Spreads those items pretty thin, considering the drop rate, doesn't it?C. The reason a lot of brown items are bad, is because they can't even potentially roll good stats. Nobody's going to want Azurewrath, because all it can roll is 50 in a primary stat. The high attack speed doesn't make up for any crit damage, life on hit, life steal, or sockets any other weapon can roll. But it's ok, because it will roll equivalent to the monster that dropped it. No, that doesn't change anything, because it's stats are set. Back to Leoric's Signet. If it roll at level 60, it would be an absolutely terrible ring. 75 in a main stat and only 1% crit chance. Nobody's taking that dive for some XP

Before anyone panics and posts an angry comment in the forums, this doesn't mean we want players to earn even fewer good items. It just means we don't feel it's necessary to present the player with hundreds of bad Rares for every one that they might want. As an example, suppose items currently roll between 1-100 Intelligence. Now, imagine that we dropped 25% as many items, but the Intelligence range was instead somewhere around 75-100. In the end, you'd find fewer items, but more of the items you find would be worth equipping. That's our goal.

Increasing the minimum stats of level 60 items is nice, and it gives a nice little mental break from finding two-handed weapons with 200-300 dps, but that's all it does. The percentage chance of finding good items will remain to be abysmal. Furthermore, 75 intelligence isn't near anywhere good enough to be a worthwhile item, and as I just said, most of the time, that's what it's going to roll.

We've also discussed allowing bosses the first time you kill them in each difficulty to have a guaranteed chance to drop a Legendary.

Bad idea. Think about how many times a player has killed a boss. That one brown item is not worth a "new feature" to try to balance anything. The point of this game is to keep farming. This will change nothing, but make the devs think they did good by adding something new.

Also, you still haven't addressed the issue of unbalanced gems. I'd like to have a use for not-emeralds, and for my emeralds to either drop in price, or have a more balanced price throughout. Limiting Crit damage somehow seems to be a good idea. Because I'm tired of finding potentially awesome weapons that I vend because there's no crit damage/socket on it.

At least you're thinking on a couple places. Customization is great, though I hope you mean stats and not aesthetic choices. Getting rid of the auction house would be a terrible idea, and you're comment about "sitting in chat for hours saying WTS/WTB" is the worst thing you can do to a game. I always equate to running dungeons in WoW before LFG came out. People complain so much about LFG, but they forget how bad it was for a dps to sit for hours in chat looking for a group, and when they even found a group, there was no guarantee that the group would be successful. Would you rather stick your items on the auction house, forget about them, and have a couple or more sell a day, or sit in trade NOT PLAYING THE GAME MIND YOU, trying to sell items and hoping you get lucky with the 100 people in there (because all the smart people turned off chat a long time ago).

Now I do not want to make the CM's mad. Do not get me wrong, I am not trying to bash Blizz by saying the following. For a long while I feel like Blizz has been taking baby steps in fixing the problems. Where it could very well take many years and both expansions in order for this game to be truly awesome.

While it is true that D2 did not truly shine until after the expansion and many patches later. But there is no reason for D3 to have to wait until you have both expansions and three years and maybe more in patches. Before this game is awesome. Taking those kind of steps, will only frustrate players and cause them to quit.

That is why if I were game director that at this point I would focus all of patch 1.0.8 on fixing itemization. Instead of waiting for some future unknown date. Which could be years down the road. You have to ask yourself, just how many players would wait years for you to finally fix itemization.

Also I say that if you fix itemization as best as you can now. You will have many players come back to hunt for those awesome new items. They will even explore the new build possibilities that open up because of the new items. With all of that time played, will give Blizz plenty of time to fix the next important classes.

Fix the classes in patch 1.0.9 would be what I would do if I were game director. This is the second most important part of the puzzle. The puzzle I am talking about is build diversity. Build diversity has two parts to the problem.

I would use patch 1.0.8 to fix itemization. Where players would have alternatives to the common gear that we use without losing the performance of your character. Also like the blog said make some pieces build specific. So that you can say hey I will try this new build for my wizard since I got this awesome drop.

Patch 1.0.9 would handle the other half of the build diversity puzzle. Then when you have excellent build diversity through gear, skills, and runes. Then you can work on the other parts of the game.

Fixing these two issues alone would no doubt bring back many players to this game. While keeping as many players that are still playing.

Now the blog did give me a few questions that I would like to ask.

One point was that each legendary will have higher versions of itself (i.e. Leroic's Signet). Now you said that sets will get the same treatment. But here is the problem, sets that are pre level 60 required level are either crafted or are only found in inferno.

1. Does this mean that we will be able to craft higher versions of the sets that exist now?2. Does this mean that the sets that do drop in inferno will have lower versions of themselves that will drop in normal to hell?

When you talk about modifying gear for appeal.

3. Does this mean we will be getting something like a transmogrification in WoW? Where we can have the look of a different piece but still have the power of the existing piece we are wearing. That way we can change the look of Vile Wards.4. When you say modifying the items you also seem to be talking about more than just appeal (looks). Does this mean that we will be able to change the stats of the gear that we have using the blacksmith, think WoW reforging?

Personally, I think there should be different optimal routes. The best route for farming xp, items, specific items, etc. I'd like to have something other to kill then just Keywarden and A3. Although, density needs to be increased drastically in some of those locations. Just saying :D I like variations and different reasons to hunt different things.

Yup! Pretty much this.

We're spending time working on monster density in Acts I, II and IV because while optimal routes are inevitable, we want things to be close enough that options exist.

Currently we have a situation where a small number of specific runs are twice (or more) as effective as your average run. This margin is too large and overshadows other factors. Our goal is to make the monster density in Inferno close enough that factors such as your skill choices and gear level start to become more relevant. Let's suppose you were trying to optimize XP/hour. What if a cookie-cutter Archon build on MP1 had one optimal run, but an SNS Wizard on MP3 had a different optimal run? Different areas also have different monsters with different abilities. Some classes have an easier time dealing with particular monster types, this can cause the “optimal run” to shift as well. If we get the overall densities closer, these other factors will start to become more relevant rather than the current situation where the raw monster density of a run dominates all other factors.

When things are close enough, you may try a run that is a little less XP/hour if it means increased Demonic Essences. Maybe you just really enjoy the art of the Act I jail. Maybe you just want some variety and haven't been to an area in a while. Maybe you want to do a full play through in co-op with a friend. It’s a matter of degree -- these aren't tradeoffs most players would make when the run results in a 50% loss in efficiency, but if the difference is 5-15% then these other factors come into consideration.

So, like Lylirra said, our goal is to avoid creating a new “most optional” run, and instead provide players with an environment that allows them to choose from multiple different options.

Ok I've finally caught up on all the responses in every location I could find them! This blog was written a while ago and between when I wrote it and when we released it a lot more relevant ideas came up so I want to mention a couple of them. I'm going to keep this short and to the point so I can get back to working on actually improving the game instead of talking about it. ;)

Below is a list of things that players can hopefully expect to see as soon as patch 1.0.8.

Mob densityActs 1, 2, and 4 will be receiving some adjustments in Inferno difficulty games. We want to try to make all of the acts as comparable as possible so that players don't feel they always have to farm the same areas of the game repeatedly, diversity is the spice of life.

Multi CraftWe want to make it easier to craft lots of items, so we plan on giving players the ability to specify how many of an item they want to craft and then to make that many. Want to make 20 Archon Shoulders of Dexterity? Cool, push the button and watch it go.

AH tooltip compareEver wish you could compare the item you are thinking about buying with the item you are wearing? You want it, we want it, and we hope to have it in game soon.

In addition to the changes we introduce in 1.0.8 we also have longer term plans to address issues that need more attention. I mentioned a lot of these long term plans in the blog and outlined some of our philosophies that will drive the itemization of Diablo forward. One of those ideas that I saw mentioned repeatedly in response to the blog is the fact that class specific items can roll non class appropriate primary stats, we have plans to change this down the road. While random really is at the core of Diablo in so many ways this is certainly one of the areas where it has no potential to benefit players. Wizards don't use Strength, Demon Hunters don't use Intelligence so let's just remove those as potential random attributes on Orbs and Quivers respectively.

We're looking at making some adjustments to monster density, and right now we'd like to see if we can get those changes in with 1.0.8. The trick with adjusting density is that, by doing so, we could inadvertently create another "most optimal" route in Act I, II, or IV. It's the kind of thing we'll be doing a lot of internal testing on before hand, and likely something we'll want to have up for additional testing on the PTR.

Personally, I don't think you can prevent creating an optimal farming route for players (even with randomization of monster density). If monster density is randomized, people will just determine a route based on highest chances.

Also, what's the problem with the existence of an optimal farming route? I understand it's frustrating that only a few area's of Act 3 are actually being farmed this last year (for both the playes as well as the developers), but wouldn't it be better to add the option to travel freely between acts to tackle this problem? That way players will enjoy more of the content of the game, without getting the feeling they're not farming efficiently.

Multi CraftWe want to make it easier to craft lots of items, so we plan on giving players the ability to specify how many of an item they want to craft and then to make that many. Want to make 20 Archon Shoulders of Dexterity? Cool, push the button and watch it go.

I am wondering why this feature wasn't implemented in the official release. I think in early WoW they also didn't have this functionality, but it was added pretty soon (when they realized how boring it was to *click* *click* *click*). Just so you know, I am fully aware WoW is an MMORPG and this game is a HnS, but it always bothered me to upgrade my stacks of gems with dozens of clicks... All these "band-aid" patches are turning into things I am actually looking forward to, while I realize that this time could have been spend on adding stuff to the game that is original and exciting for the players.

for customization purposes, you could let the class specific items roll whatever pristat and just let the characters choose their pristat when the game is created. then remove dexterity from the game entirely!